blog home Medical Malpractice How Doctors Administer Medication (and Why It Matters)

How Doctors Administer Medication (and Why It Matters)

By lladmin on May 14, 2022

How Drugs are Used in the Healthcare Setting

Drugs serve many roles in a healthcare setting. They can be used to treat a disease, ease suffering, supply a missing substance, encourage a bodily reaction, or induce unconsciousness. But in the United States, delivering the right drugs to the right patients is a process beset with medication errors.

As noted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, drug-related reactions and injuries account for nearly 700,000 emergency room visits and 100,000 hospitalizations each year, and these numbers are likely underreported. Meanwhile, at least 5% of hospitalized patients will suffer harm through an adverse drug event. And an estimated 50% of these ADEs are preventable.

Medication errors can take place at any stage between the doctor prescribing a medication to the nurse administering the medication to a patient.

There are five “rights” of medication safety every healthcare provider should practice:

  • Right drug. It’s essential for the person who actually administers the drug to double-check the label on the bottle.
  • Right dosage. These errors can usually be prevented by checking the label when the drug is administered to make sure the right amount is being used. But if a doctor or pharmacist failed to correctly issue the right dosage, it can also cause an error.
  • Right time. The person who administers the drug must follow a strict schedule or medication log and mark it off each time the drug is administered. Caregivers must communicate in this way to prevent double dosing.
  • Right patient. The person who administers the drug must make sure that the name on the bottle matches the patient’s name.
  • Right route. Also called erroneous route of administration, wrong-route error, and medical device misconnection, these failures are mostly committed by nurses, who tend to be the ones to administer drugs in an inpatient setting. Though children under 5 and elderly adults are at higher risk for most medication errors, administration errors are equal-opportunity: for example, no one can survive their oxygen tubing being connected to an IV line. The embolism will kill within seconds.

We cannot afford to overlook an incorrect administration. Ever.

If you or someone you love has been injured or killed due to a medication error, our trial lawyers at Leventhal Puga Braley P.C. represent people who have suffered catastrophic injuries due to medical malpractice. If a wrongly administered medication harmed you or a loved one, call (303) 759-9945 today and schedule a FREE consultation with our legal team.

How Doctors Prescribe Medications

Besides relying on the drug manufacturer’s indications and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s approval for use, doctors must consider the type of drug, the part of the body that needs treatment, how the drug will interact with all the patient’s systems, and that particular patient’s age, weight, and health. Does he have liver trouble? Does she have a condition that makes her more vulnerable to certain side effects?

The prescribing physician must also take into account medications that the patient is already taking as well as allergies. The potential benefits of the medication must be weighed against any potential harm caused by known side effects or drug interactions.

Blood tests are often run to determine if a prescribed amount of medication is working or not. For some high-risk drugs, patients should be kept in hospital care so staff can observe how the drug is affecting them. Would medical professionals do any less for their own family members? We don’t think so.

Deciding how a medication should be administered largely depends on standard practice, clinical research, and the effectiveness vs. the danger of a particular application. For example, some drugs are destroyed by gastric juices and therefore shouldn’t be delivered via the stomach. But serious harm is a bigger consideration.

One of our clients was given an epidural injection for pain control prior to her son’s wedding. The problem? This particular drug, Kenalog, had an explicit warning that it was not to be given as an epidural injection. The drug caused a stroke; minutes later, our client was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. This once-active woman is now confined to a wheelchair and couldn’t even attend her son’s wedding. The family was devastated; the jury awarded them $14.9 million.

How Medications Can Be Administered

There is some overlap in these definitions, but we want to be thorough. For example, a medication may be an intravenous infusion. A medication delivered enterally may also be delivered rectally with no ill effects. Here is a list detailing possible administration methods, though it is not all-inclusive:

  • Buccal: Placed inside the cheek, absorbed through the mouth’s tissues and delivered to the bloodstream.
  • Enteral: Delivered directly to the gastrointestinal tract (usually, into the stomach or intestine through a J-tube), but it can also be delivered through the rectum. There are two main methods: mixing the substance with food or water or using a G-tube passed through the nose or mouth into the stomach.
  • Epidural: Injected into the epidural space around the spinal cord.
  • Inhalable: Breathed into the lungs through a tube or mask. Anesthesia is sometimes delivered this way.
  • Infused: Injected into a vein with an intravenous line and slowly dripped in over time.
  • Intracerebroventricular or intraventricular: Injected into the cerebral ventricles (sections in the brain where cerebrospinal fluid is produced) to bypass the blood-brain barrier. It is used in the treatment of certain cancers.
  • Intramuscular: Injected into muscle with a syringe. Which muscle, and how deep the syringe goes, may differ depending on the drug and the condition it is meant to treat.
  • Intraperitoneal: Injected into the perineal cavity, which is a fluid lining in the abdomen.
  • Intrathecal: Injected into the spinal theca.
  • Intravenous: Injected into a vein or IV line.
  • Nasal or intranasal: Delivered into the nostrils as a mist or droplets, by spray or pump. Most intranasal delivery is not FDA approved.
  • Ophthalmic: Delivered into the eye by drops, gel, or ointment.
  • Oral: Delivered by mouth via swallowing. Usually in the form of pills, tablets, capsules, lozenges, or liquids.
  • Otic: Delivered via drops in the ear.
  • Rectal: Delivered via inserting into the rectum.
  • Subcutaneous: Injected just under the top layers of skin.
  • Sublingal: Held under the tongue, where it dissolves into the blood-rich tissues.
  • Topical: Held against or rubbed on the skin
  • Transdermal: Absorbed through a patch placed against the skin.

Some of these delivery methods are used mainly in animal studies (like intraperitoneal, intraventricular, and intranasal), but are rarely used on humans. A route may be classified based on where the medication is applied, or where it is intended to take action. Different medications require different administration to be effective – obviously, eye drops are of little use outside the eye. And the wrong medication delivered the wrong way, as we’ve seen, can be life-changing or fatal.

What Allows Administration Errors to Happen?

Let’s use an example. Tranexamic acid is given to patients to stop bleeding by preventing the breakdown of fibrin, a protein that helps to clot blood. But recently, this medication has been confused with a common anesthesia and inserted into patients’ spines. This turns it into a “potent neurotoxin with a mortality rate of about 50%. Survivors of intraspinal tranexamic acid often experience seizures, permanent neurological injury, and paraplegia.” Since several errors were reported secretly to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, we do not know if these patients lived or died. The “reason” for the administration failure? Both tranexamic acid and the anesthetic came in bottles with blue caps, though they are different sizes and have different labels. Doctors failed to re-check the labels before administering the deadly dose.

Mistakes like this simply cannot be made, and they show the larger issue at stake in American healthcare. Our law firm has experience with various wrong-route situations, such as:

  • Enteral formulas given any other way than through the digestive tract. For example, delivering a formula meant for a feeding tube to an IV line. These cases are usually fatal.
  • Oral medication given intravenously. This is a surprisingly common error that comes about when nurses use IV syringes to measure out an oral solution dose, and are interrupted or pass the syringe to someone else who then inserts it intravenously. These cases are also usually fatal.
  • Intravenous medication given through the spine. See the tranexamic acid example above. IV and epidural lines may also be mixed up, and this can prove deadly, especially to a mother in childbirth.
  • Intravenous medication given orally. IV solutions are given in this manner specifically to control the dosage and duration of the drug administration. If a patient ingests IV drugs, it will almost always be harmful and may lead to an overdose.
  • Intramuscular preparations given intravenously. Intramuscular solutions are to be injected as far as possible from major blood vessels and nerves to avoid nerve damage AND intravenous absorption, generally because they are supposed to be absorbed more slowly into the body. Overdose is a danger here as well.

Failure to Communicate

How do these injuries and deaths happen? Failures to communicate are believed to cause up to 85% of hospital‐related never events and are strongly associated with medication errors – and it’s easy to see why.

Unclear labeling, vague instructions from doctor to nurse, similar-looking containers that aren’t kept separate, and “one size fits all” tubing or line connectors all play a part in harming thousands of people every day.

To reduce the possibility of error, a pharmacist should always repeat the order to nurses or prescribers, get confirmation, and document the conversation.

When patients are seriously injured by professional failures, we believe medical professionals need to be held responsible, both at an individual level and for their hospital-wide policies and procedures. And we can do this through a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Talk to a Nationally Acclaimed Law Firm Today

At Leventhal Puga Braley P.C., our Denver medical malpractice attorneys have deep experience in these cases and handle claims across the United States. We can help you file a claim that allows you to start putting your life back together. And we aren’t afraid to go to trial if that what it takes to get you the money you need.

Call (303) 759-9945 to learn more today. We’re on your side.

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Posted in: Medical Malpractice